


With You Again

by mmolloy



Series: Near Misses and Absolute Hits [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: A Though Experiment, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It of Sorts, I wrote something!, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Minisode: Many Happy Returns, Not thesis-related!, Yay me!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 15:41:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6913177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mmolloy/pseuds/mmolloy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who was at the door at the end of Many Happy Returns? How might that answer have changed John Watson's life?</p>
            </blockquote>





	With You Again

**Author's Note:**

> "The average life is full of near misses and absolute hits, of great love and small disasters. It’s made up of banana milkshakes, loft insulation, and random shoes. It’s dead ordinary and truly truly amazing. What you’ve got to realize is it’s all here now. So breathe deep and swallow it whole because take it from me, life just whizzes by then all of a sudden it’s…"
> 
> ~Eugene Jones, "Torchwood"

_“Oh, and don’t worry— I’m going to be with you again very soon.”_

The doorbell rings at precisely the right moment, saving John from what would have very likely become an afternoon spent trying his damndest to discover a different world at the bottom of the bottle of Lagavulin that is currently burning a hole in his awareness from the cabinet. He presses the freeze button on the remote, the Sherlock on the screen backlit by the sun of a long-ago Baker Street morning, his curls flopping imperfect and wild across his high, pale forehead. 

 _Maximum pressure, just under the half-second._  

“Shut up,” he grumbles under his breath, rising from the rough, hard cushions of the sofa with only a mostly-ignorable twinge from his leg. 

Not that the Sherlock in his head ever listens to this request; he speaks up whenever he pleases and at the most inconvenient moments, which is of course precisely what John would expect from him, even in hallucinatory form. He will be hurrying to get the tube or browsing for dinner inspiration in the picked-over Tesco Express, and there will be the Sherlock in his mind, piping up out of nowhere at the sight of a young person whose shoes tell the story of their recent return from Bangladesh or a harried-looking City boy whose choice of cigarettes betray his illicit affair with his boss’s husband. 

John can of course never be sure if any of these little observations have even the slightest merit, but he can’t stop himself from making them. Force of habit. He’s trained himself not to physically start at the sight of a dramatic coat on a rainy winter street, convinced his heart not to jump at a momentary flash of dark curls, but no matter what he does, he can’t stop himself noticing the little details of the people with whom he shares this ordinary, everyday London. And in every tiny detail, no matter how hard he tried to ignore him, there is Sherlock, whispering in his ear.

John hopes very much, as he walks into the flat’s narrow hallway, that whoever is at the door will maybe bugger off if he takes his time answering. He’s expended quite a lot of unexpected energy already today, playing the successfully coping former-flatmate for Greg, and is very much looking forward to returning to his scotch and letting the Sherlock on the DVD be rude and kind and funny and mean on a loop until the urge to smash the telly becomes too great and he picks up Mary at the clinic and takes her out for dinner. 

The bell rings again, a little more insistently this time, pressed down for one and a half seconds before silencing as John’s step hits the creaky floorboard in the small foyer. He frowns to himself at some people’s refusal to take a hint before smoothing his face into the more neutral and decidedly businesslike expression that the Sherlock in his head observes is the one he uses when he is planning to pull rank. He shoves the thought to the back of his head, trying not to think of Baskerville and drugged tea and the memory of Sherlock’s long body in the other single bed, and then flexes his fingers before grasping the knob and swinging open the door. 

The Sherlock in the doorway blinks at him with uncertain eyes. 

His shoulders are broad in his crisp, beautifully white dress shirt, but hunched up protectively as if expecting imminent pain. The clean lines of his trousers skim along his slender legs, but they are all stiff and tense as if bracing for an oncoming attack. His curls are wilting slightly in the wet April air, droplets of London mist condensing in them and reflecting in the weak sunlight as he gazes steadily at John. The expression on his face is one John had never imagined before: a kind of careful, tenuous hope that is laced at its edges with uncertainty and softness and fear. He dips his chin and drops his eyes to the ground in a gesture that means he’s recognized his own insensitivity and is hoping to silently make amends. The familiarity of it burns in John’s throat, clenching his fist convulsively, and he slams the door before the Sherlock on the other side can open his mouth and say something unforgivable. 

He allows himself a moment to lean back against the door, where he can almost imagine the warmth of Sherlock’s hand where it might be pressed against the laminate. His extremities are buzzing with shock and adrenaline, and he takes several deep, centering breaths before straightening and walking with purpose back into the empty sitting room. 

He goes straight to the cabinet and pulls the bottle of scotch out, refilling his glass almost to the top. He downs an enormous gulp straight from the bottle before slamming it down on the side table and lowering himself into the grey-green leather armchair as his leg threatens to give out beneath him, breath unsteady as he collapses against the back. 

He can feel the irregularity of his breathing, the sharp, uneven gasps in through the nose that Ella had told him he uses to stop himself from actually feeling. But honestly, screw bloody Ella, who would never be able to convince him that this isn’t a perfectly reasonable reaction to seeing one’s resurrected best friend standing sheepishly at one’s front door. His mind has gone curiously numb, the pounding of his heart and his own ragged breathing the only things keeping him present. He can feel, from what felt like very far away, the telltale stinging behind his eyes, a prickling, familiar tightness that he ruthlessly wills into submission. 

He will _not_ cry for Sherlock. Not again. 

John takes a more measured sip of his scotch, the muscles of his hand twitching around the glass in an effort to clench his hand into a fist. He feels the liquid burn with the tears at the back of his throat, and then pushes the tumbler just slightly out of reach on the scuffed little side table before placing his hands—purposefully, carefully— palms-down on his knees. And he waits then, trying to keep the glass on the table from flickering enticingly into the corner of his eye. Whatever is about to happen, he is absolutely certain that he doesn’t want to be drunk for it. 

The quality of the midday light in the little garden flat fluctuates as it could do on these liminal, damp spring days in London. John watches the shadows of the sitting room around him darken and then brighten once more as the clouds outside shift over the course of the next quarter hour, hands steady on his knees, counting his own steady heartbeats. 

The swift, efficient clicking of lock picks comes after twenty minutes that could be twenty seconds or twenty hours, the front door shutting gently before light, tentative footsteps pause just out of John’s line of sight, beyond the sitting room door. 

“Did you plan it?”

His voice is toneless. It does not shake. The end of his sentence stays steady, does not drop off into a whisper or a choked back sob. He speaks to the corner of the room, where Mary’s horrid chrome-and-yellow floor lamp glints garishly in the shifting light. He will not look toward the door, will not wait to see that coat, those curls, those beautiful ridiculous eyes that he’s tried so valiantly to stop searching for. 

“I… plan?”

His fist clenches on his knee. He can’t help it. The pain of his own fingernails shoots up through his spinal cord, registering gratefully in his disbelieving brain. This is real. It’s really happening. Or if it’s not, he’s too far gone now for it to matter anyway. 

“With Greg. Was this your idea of a joke? Get Lestrade in on the game, get him to bring me this goddamned—“ the emotions he’s trying so hard not to feel rise up to choke him, and he once again takes several deep, shuddery breaths, never looking away from the lamp in the corner. “‘ _I’m going to be with you again very soon._ ’ Proper stitch up, that. Hilarious.”

He feels it when Sherlock enters the room properly. It’s like all of the air has been ionized, crackling around them and in the five or so feet of space between. It’s lurchingly, sickeningly familiar, this perfect awareness of Sherlock’s proximity; it’s like waking one morning to find the limb you’d had amputated almost two years before suddenly alive and zinging once again with nerves, the presence of it more painful than its absence ever could have been. He hears Sherlock’s little intake of breath, feels his head turn slightly away as the force of his gaze is suddenly directed elsewhere. His breath is shaky. John can hear the tension in it. 

And then paused image still on the television— a Sherlock he’d thought dead and buried looking up at the camera with that soft, private little smile— comes slamming back into John’s awareness as his stomach drops in mortification. God, what must he look like right now? Half empty bottle of scotch, early afternoon on a Wednesday, homemade DVD of his old flatmate paused on the telly screen… pathetic. 

And then the anger comes, thick and cloying in his throat. It feels somehow similar to the heavy, pervasive sadness he’d been anticipating from today after Lestrade showed up with the video, but kinetic instead of leaden. Galvanizing, not paralyzing. He is up and out of the chair before he’s even registered, striding quickly to the telly screen and switching it off with enough force to make it wobble precariously on its stand. And then he stares at it, his back to the rest of the room as his heartbeat thunders in his ears. 

“Bloody hilarious.”

“John, I—“ but the sound of his name in that voice, with the living, breathing warmth of its owner pressing into every bit of John’s awareness, is too much. He whirls around and has Sherlock slammed up against the busy red wallpaper John’s never liked before he has time for more than a surprised little exhalation of air, bitten off as if in pain. John doesn’t much care. 

“No,” he hisses. “No, Sherlock—“ and the name feels as if it’s burning on the way out. “There’s nothing. Nothing you could say right now that would stop me wanting to hate you. You—“ he swallows, still not meeting Sherlock’s eyes. His hands are gripped painfully tight around Sherlock’s shoulders, digging into his upper back that’s tight with coiled tension. His gaze is fixed somewhere to the right of Sherlock’s face, the floral confusion of red and gold seeming to move dizzily as he can’t help but catch the achingly familiar scent of him. 

“You let me watch you die. You made me _stand_ there and _watch_ while you flung yourself off a building. I took your _pulse_. I saw your _head_ splattered all over the pavement. You made me watch you _kill yourself_ , and you—“ he breaks off again, his throat closing painfully around the ultimate horror that’s plagued his waking hours for more than eighteen months.

“You left me here without you.”

Mary’s recently-procured vintage clock ticks obnoxiously into the otherwise silent room. John can hear his own unsteady breathing, see the pulse beating hard in Sherlock’s pale neck. He can feel as much as see Sherlock clench his eyes shut, the shifting of the skin over the bit of jawline that’s visible in John’s determinedly focused gaze moving his shoulders the minutest little bit. He closes his own eyes, caught somewhere in the turbulent, nauseous waters between fury and sorrow and incandescent joy. 

The harsh, ragged choking sound that breaks the growing silence is accompanied by the sudden quaking of Sherlock’s shoulders beneath his trembling hands. It startles John so completely that he immediately forgets his resolution not to look at Sherlock’s face, his eyes shooting with perfect precision to drink him in like the first rain after a drought. 

Sherlock is crying. 

It takes John a moment to register it after blinking away his first real glimpse of Sherlock like the imprint after a burst of sunlight— the red rimming his unnameable eyes and the shiny tracks that run to quiver in drops at his chin and on his lips. It’s not soft crying, either. The silent sobs rack Sherlock’s body— so thin, _too_ thin, too fragile under John’s rough hands— as he struggles ineffectively to keep them quiet. 

John is frozen there, so close to his face. He has never seen this before, ever, and of all the unbelievable, mad, miraculous things this unremarkable Wednesday afternoon has brought, this might actually take the prize. 

He wants so badly to hate Sherlock for the way this happened— for Sherlock blithely ringing the doorbell of this claustrophobic little flat as John sat inside pressing ever harder on the bruises that he’d never wanted to heal— but he finds that it’s impossible. Sherlock is hurting, Sherlock is in pain, and it is as it ever was John’s chosen lot in life to make it stop and prevent it from happening ever again. His right hand smooths unhesitatingly up to wrap gently behind Sherlock’s neck, guiding his head down and into the curve of John’s shoulder.

“I—“ Sherlock gasps, still stiff and tense as John’s other arm wraps gently around him. They’ve never been this close before— the occasional car boot kidnapping attempt notwithstanding— and John’s lungs and arms and mind are suddenly full, gloriously full, of weeping, breathing, _living_ Sherlock Holmes. It’s almost to much, and yet he knows in this moment that it will also never ever be enough. 

Sherlock must sense something in the way John’s body relaxes, because all of the tension goes out of his limbs and he collapses into John with a great, shuddering teary sigh, his big hands clutching at John’s shirt hard enough to pull it twingingly taught across his shoulders. John can feel tears soaking into his collar and onto the unprotected skin of his neck, where he can sense the weight of them, achingly real, with nerve endings that seem to have suddenly come back to full, stinging life. It feels like eyes locking from across a medical laboratory. It feels like a manic chase across rooftops and through alleyways. It feels like steaming hot Chinese food at two in the morning, and John has been starving for years. 

It feels like home. 

They sink down onto the awful sofa, John pulling Sherlock up so that his long body is pressed up against John’s side and across his chest. He lets Sherlock continue to weep into his shoulder, shivery little hiccoughs that turn into whole body convulsions and then finally settle into a steady flow of weeping that feels to John like poison seeping from some vile, invisible wound. He keeps one hand on the back of Sherlock’s neck, his fingers tracing idly through the thick, fine hair at his nape, while the other holds him close, pressing him gently against John’s chest. 

“I wanted you with me every day,” Sherlock finally says, his voice hoarse and very congested from crying. He sniffles wetly, and it should make John cringe at the sticky reality of Sherlock, but it does not. Instead, he presses Sherlock’s head closer to his neck, reveling in the wet, mildly disgusting _hereness_  of the man in his arms. 

“Every second I was away, John,” and the sound of his name in Sherlock’s mouth again makes John’s heart beat faster. “If I could have seen any other way, if there had been any other choice—“ and here he has to stop again to bring his voice back under control as it wobbles irrepressably towards tears again, John smoothing a hand over the back of his hair and waiting for his equilibrium to return. “I couldn’t let him take you from me— I. I wouldn’t have— you’ve always been the stronger of the two of us, and I. I wouldn’t have survived it if he’d actually gotten the chance for what he’d threatened to do.”

John feels his brain grind to an unpleasant halt before speeding up again and racing off down a completely different track. ‘He’ could only be one person, and John remembers with shuddering clarity the clammy feeling of elegantly manicured fingers caressing his hair as he sat strapped, immobile, into a bomb vest. He remembers the panic in Sherlock’s voice as he’d ripped the Semtex from John’s body, the manic intensity of his pacing and the sick look of dread as he followed the glowing red sites across John's chest with his eyes. 

It had been the night that changed it all for John, really. The night he’d decided that, if he couldn’t live his life with Sherlock by his side, he’d be content to have him there as they died.

“He took _you_ from _me_ , Sherlock,” John murmurs, eyes pricking again with wretched tears. “And, well. I guess you can see how well I’ve been surviving it.” He gave a humorless chuckle as he felt Sherlock’s head move fractionally toward the scotch resting forsaken on the side table. “Not well, as it turns out. ‘Stronger of the two of us’ my pale English arse.”

Sherlock gives a wet chuckle into the skin of John’s neck, breathing hot and damp and still a bit uneven into the hinge of his jaw. “I wasn’t going to mention it, in fact, but. Drinking and watching old home movies in the middle of the afternoon, John? Bit maudlin.”

“Shut it,” growls John without heat, tightening his fingers just barely in the wilting curls of Sherlock’s hair. Sherlock gives a little shiver. “A bloke doesn’t expect the dead bastard he’s been pining for to suddenly make a miraculous return from the grave just to crash his pity party, you know.”

Sherlock goes very still for a moment, before pulling himself more firmly against John, his arms worming between them to encircle John’s chest in kind. He buries his face fully again in John’s neck, his lips brushing stubble-rough skin in a way that makes John’s entire body break out in goose pimples. 

“Me too,” he whispers, voice rough with too much feeling. “Me too.”

John doesn’t need to ask what he means. 

They sit there in the quiet of the flat, the ticking of the clock suddenly no longer obnoxious as it helps John mark the time of Sherlock’s steady breathing. The weight of him against John’s chest and across his lap feels too perfect to actually be happening, and he digs a nail once again roughly into the fleshy meat of his palm. It hurts like salvation, like coming back to life. Like the mere presence in this space of Sherlock’s living, breathing body is reanimating the husk of humanity John’s been walking around in since that nightmare day at St. Bart’s. He glories in it, in the feeling of his arms where they wrap around that beloved ( _beloved? Yes, of course. Always._ ) form and the sharpness of his senses as they drink in the sight and scent and sound of Sherlock as he breathes quietly in John’s embrace. They sit there in the lengthening shadows as the day drives on toward evening, and John would be happy to live in this quiet darkness for the rest of his suddenly-fathomable life. 

Finally, Sherlock sighs quietly and moves to disentangle himself gently from John, who only reluctantly allows him to go. Sherlock winces slightly on the way up, and as he swings his legs so that they are sitting side by side on the sofa, his eyes flick guiltily to John’s face in a way that is instantly suspicious. 

“What is it?” John murmurs, his right hand still resting softly against Sherlock’s hair. “Are you hurt? Did I hurt you? Christ, Sherlock, if I—“

“You didn’t do anything, John,” Sherlock interrupts, one hand darting out to alight reassuringly on John’s knee. “Bit of a knife fight in Serbia, that’s all. Mycroft called me back before the assignment could get too dodgy, though. I’ll be fine in a few weeks.”

“A _bit_ of a knife fight?” John laughs, disbelieving. “There is no such thing as a _bit_ of a knife fight in sodding _Serbia_ , you ridiculous madman. What in the _hell_ have you been—“ John abruptly cuts himself off as Sherlock’s eyes close and his shoulders sag, bringing his head down to rest against John’s shoulder once more. 

“I’ll tell you everything,” he murmurs, his voice low and soft and so, so gentle. “Whatever you want to know, every detail I can think of, I promise. Just. Not right now. Right now I just want to—“ he lifts John’s hand carefully to his lips and slowly, as though afraid John might spook after all this and run away, press a kiss to the middle of his palm.

John’s heart may very well implode; collapse in on itself like a dying star until there is nothing left of it but the hot, dense core that has always, _always_ belonged to Sherlock. Careful not to jostle Sherlock too much, he pulls him in close again and presses his lips finally, desperately, to the place above his temple that is clean and whole and unmarred by the blood that may someday now not be a constant presence in John’s dreams.

“We have a lot to talk about, you and I,” he whispers into Sherlock’s hair, and settles back into the corner of the sofa, pulling Sherlock with him as he goes. 

Sherlock comes willingly, brushing another kiss into John’s hand before pressing it against the steady beating of his heart.

“We have time.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there! So, you know how Pilot!John and Sherlock hopped into bed together about fifteen minutes after leaving the Jeff Hope crime scene and are currently married with a dog and some rooftop honeybees? If you didn't know, now you know. 
> 
> Well, in thinking about those yahoos, I started thinking about all the other 'near misses'. The moments when, if they'd zigged instead of zagged, we'd already be watching the Consulting Husbands show. The tipping points when someone stepped back from the edge, thus prolonging both their own pain and ours. I've got a few abrewin' already in the back of my mind, and I'm going to try to write them all, but I'd absolutely love to hear about the ones that haunt your dreams, too! 
> 
> This is the first one I've written, because Many Happy Returns was fucking me up recently, but I'm hoping to take some of the others off the back burner sooner rather than later. Come along and follow me at wearthedamnhatholmes.tumblr.com if you want updates on me, or if you're just a fan of inarticulate screaming. :-P


End file.
